Attendance at Breslin Center in '12-13 was down slightly from the previous year

The attendance for last night's Portland-Michigan State men's basketball game at Breslin Center was listed as 14,797, but "reality tells a very different story as significant chunks of empty seats greeted the Spartans when they took the floor as the top-ranked team in the nation for the first time since 2001," according to Matt Charboneau of the DETROIT NEWS. When MSU coach Tom Izzo was asked after the game "how he felt seeing the empty seats, he took a long pause, measured his tone and simply said, 'Disappointment.'" Then he added, "You get a ranking, whether it's deserved or not, you get in a position that few Spartan fans have ever seen, all I ask of those people is -- I got no problem you don't want to come to a game. I got no problem at all. Give your tickets, 'cause I got thousands of people that are dying to come. And that affected a lot of people, including me" (DETROIT NEWS, 11/19). In Detroit, Jeff Seidel notes the game was "recorded as a sellout, but that's only because the tickets were sold." Detroit Free Press MSU beat writer Joe Rexrode said that it was "one of the smallest crowds he had seen in years." Seidel writes MSU fans "should be embarrassed." It "didn't make sense, and Izzo begged the fans to give away their tickets, if they didn't want to come." Seidel: "Was the small crowd because of the storm over the weekend? Was it because thousands of people in Michigan don't have power? Perhaps. But it was shocking to see such a small crowd on a day that felt so momentous for this program" (DETROIT FREE PRESS, 11/19).